Bogota Blogger

Just around the corner from where I live is an old and somewhat decrepit mansion called Villa Adelaida. It sits on a plot of land that stetches two blocks, from the Septima to the Quinta, just north of Calle 70. It’s also been a controversial subject for the past two years, as long as I have lived here, because some developers want their hands on it.

Right now Villa Adelaida is some kind of office for a parking company, and the back half of the property, the part facing Quinta, is actually a parking lot (and and expensive one) on the next block from where I live. It was scheduled to be converted into a shopping mall by Pedro Gomez, one of the biggest developers in Colombia and in Latin America, but the people in the neighborhood thought that was a totally inappropriate use.

There was some buzz about it in the neighborhood, since apparently zoning rules were being ingnored, but zoning rules in Bogota are fairly lax to start with, and anybody with a little cash has no problem getting around them. Still, it’s a neighborhood where a fair number of important and influential folk live.

So, when there was some media attention last year just as the project was getting its final approvals, we had a little bit of a dust-up from some neighborhood activists. A guy I tutored in English, a Colombian who works for Microsoft and also lives in the neighborhood, was explaining to me how the project violated zoning terms and would bring huge amounts of traffic into a basically residential neighborhood. But, he said, he expected the project would go through, because Colombians, even if they complain to each other about something, aren’t usually intersted in getting involved, and hardly ever try to hold their politicians accountable for doing the right thing.

Well, surprisingly, I guess, there was a huge campaign in the neighborhood. Many apartment buildings, mine included, hung huge two and three story bright orange signs saying things like “Preservacion: SI, Centro Comercial: NO!” (Preservation: YES, Shopping Center: NO). Then, pretty quickly before anything could happen, there was a huge headline in El Tiempo (the main Bogota newspaper) saying that the project was called off because it turned out drug money was behind it.

Now, my Bogotano friends who know about these things say that drug money is behind just about everything, but that when it comes out in public, the government has to make things look good and squash projects. I’d like to be a little less cynical, but I have heard of too many corruption stories to think that the government is as nearly as clean as it needs to be.

A couple months ago there was a survey in my mailbox asking for input regarding how Villa Adelaida should be preserved and/or developed. There were something like five options, and all of them included some sort of shopping center option. So, we’ll see…

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Neighborhoods, The Colombian Way of Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.